CBC, grad students cover palliative care and death in Canada
Filed under: Health policy, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline
The CBC’s new series on dying has a unique provenance: The stories are the work of 16 graduate students at The University of Western Ontario, as well as that of CBC health reporters, and are the final product of a unique journalism course focused on reporting on death and dying. 
The collaboration seems to have started with a definition of its title, “A Good Death.” In this case, it means one that is “peaceful, loving and comfortable.” Access to such an end, the journalists found, varied widely depending on economic, geographic and cultural circumstances.
The introduction to the package has wonderful descriptions of all the stories that went into it but they don’t link to the pieces. I’ve taken the liberty of adding relevant links, then copying and pasting that section below.
- Reporters Adela Talbot and Sean Leathong discover that children are among the most underserved in end-of-life care. The health care system is not organized to provide for their needs. Talbot and Leathong interview physicians in the relatively new field of pediatric palliative care and who focus on helping parents and children let go.
- Nicole Case explores why doctors have such a hard time discussing dying with their terminal patients, and how that discomfort can cause further stress and harm for patients and their families.
- Jared Lindzon looks at access to palliative care across the country and its dependence on private donations.
- Bethany Cairns and Mariam Ahmad report on why while most Canadians want to die at home, but few actually do.
- Alex Ballingall spends time with the health care workers specializing in palliative care to see how they cope with the intense emotions of their job.
- Music therapist, Jill Kennedy-Tufts, who records the thoughts, songs and prayers of the dying to leave as final gifts to loved ones, is profiled by Angela Richardson.
- The physiological and psychological relationship between love and death is described by Lauren Pelley.
- Chinese Canadian conceptions of a good death are examined by Fan-Yee Suen.
- Alineh Haidery explains end-of life customs for Muslim Canadians.
- Legal debates about pulling the plug and who gets to decide are examined by Brian Moskowitz.
- Heather Young discovers a variety of definitions of dying and explains why these definitions can make a difference in access to palliative care.
- Edward von Aderkas looks back and provides a fascinating snapshot of how dying has changed in Canada over the past century.
- And Trevor Melanson and Stefanie Masotti bring us up-to-date with an examination of the way social media is influencing how we die today.
Palliative care piece launches embedded dispatches
Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Michael Vitez has been embedded with Abington Memorial Hospital in suburban Montgomery County, Pa. Karl Stark, the Inquirer’s health and science editor, writes that “means he went there for an extended period and reported what he saw with almost no restrictions.”
Here’s how Vitez describes the series, which will be published over the next few months:
My goal is to spend a year at Abington, writing stories that show how one hospital deals with the biggest issues in health care today and also the changes that are coming fast and furious - regardless of what Congress and the President do - to hospitals and health care.
This first story looks at how the palliative care movement is medicine’s response to the dismal way people have died. I try to show, up close, how the team works, the agony that families feel, the immense costs involved.
In future stories, I’m going to look at how a hospital struggles to bring down infection rates, how it handles patients who have nowhere to go, the madness of one Medicare rule, the impact of the uninsured, and more. I hope in the end readers will get a bedside view of how things work, how things are changing, and I hope a great appreciation for our common humanity.
Vitez’s first report is a very readable and nuanced account of palliative care, something he looks at from the perspective of a patient’s family as well as that of the medical professionals.
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